Re: Variable-width font indentation

["Herring, Davis" <herring@lanl.gov>]

>         match opt with
>         | []     -> []
>         | x :: t -> x :: f t
> 
> You'd want to scale the spaces according to the line *below*, not ebove,

As per your other message, that's a problem regardless of tab handling.  Yet more heuristics suggest themselves (in this case, looking for text shared between two adjacent lines to guide the alignment), but of course those are becoming a mess.

> and even then you'd have to account for the fact that 'x ' isn't as wide as '[]'.

Maybe I misunderstand -- how is this a problem?  If the number of spaces is correct, it identifies the correct character to match against.

> Smart Tabs are also not very good for languages like ELisp with variable indentation depths.

Which cases are hard?  I just see several places where you would use only spaces (_):

(progn
>-(foo)
>-(bar))

(and
_(foo)
_(bar))

(and (foo)
_____(bar))

> If anything, I think this is more of an argument in favor of
> elastic tabs (http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/).

Those are certainly interesting, but they have their own ambiguities (e.g.,

int>-x>-= 1,
>-y>-=2;
doTheFoo();>-// it's true
doTheBar();>-// so far

where there should not be a "column block" 4 lines tall).  They also of course do not play well with existing rendering (monospace or otherwise).

Davis